Today is the North American release day for Dragon Age II, BioWare's role-playing sequel, which will be available in Europe on Friday. In addition to the retail edition, the game is also available online from the EA Store, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, and Steam. Also, the BioWare Social Network offers a high-resolution texture pack for the game. Here's word on the 1.08 GB patch: "Using high-resolution textures requires a graphics card with at least 1024MB video memory. Most of the benefits from the Hi-resolution textures will only be seen if you are able to run the game in DirectX 11." For those interested in sampling the game, a playable demo was released last month.

I'm not sure how Bioware managed to release DA, DA:O and DA2 in such a short space of time. The cynical side of me suspects it has something to do with the sounds of cash registers ringing.

I think they forgot that when trying to balance the interests of the dev team versus the marketing/sales team, the former is always the one to go with.

I don't know enough about game development to know how long it should take. I mean, it was 6 months faster than BG->BG2, but I don't know how much of that was rushing/cutting stuff and how much was better tools and being able to hire more people, as you need some better tools and some more people anyway.